17 Are Killed in Pakistan Bombings

Sunday

One of the strikes hit a commercial area of Peshawar, the first major city attacked in months.

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Three bombings struck troubled areas of Pakistan on Saturday, including Peshawar, a provincial capital and the first major city to be attacked in months.

The bombings, which killed at least 17 people and wounded more than 90, appeared to be a calculated attempt by militants to strike back at the Pakistani military, which has been conducting a campaign against them since this spring in northern and western Pakistan.

The operations had achieved some success. Civilian casualties in August reached their lowest level in a year, according to figures from the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies, and Pakistan’s major cities, Lahore and Islamabad, which used to suffer near-weekly bombings, had been quiet for months.

But the attack in Peshawar, a suicide bombing, which killed 10 people, underscored the ability that militants still have of striking inside Pakistan’s major cities. The blast hit a military site less than a mile from the United States Consulate, near a bank owned by the Pakistani military that had been hit before, said Liaqat Khan, the city’s police chief.

The bomber drove into the area in a vehicle packed with about 200 pounds of explosives, gouging a three-foot crater into a main road, the authorities said.

It came just hours after another suicide bomber hit a police station in Bannu, a tribal area in northwestern Pakistan, killing five police officers and one prisoner, according to Malik Naveed, the inspector general of police for North-West Frontier Province.

In a third attack on Saturday, one shopkeeper was killed and three others were wounded when a homemade bomb exploded in the northern city of Gilgit, an area of sectarian tension, the Associated Press of Pakistan, a Pakistani news agency, reported.

Mr. Naveed said that the suicide bombings appeared to be the work of the Taliban, but Mr. Khan said that the authorities had not determined the perpetrators. The police detained three people taking video at the scene in Peshawar. “It is premature to blame any group,” Mr. Khan said. “We want to keep our minds open.”

“This is a reaction to the operation we launched,” said Iftikhar Hussein, the information minister for North-West Frontier Province, in an interview on Pakistan’s Express 24/7 television network. “We are on the front lines so we are facing this problem. This is the responsibility of the whole world.”

Pakistan moved thousands of troops away from its eastern border with its longtime foe, India, to launch offensives against Taliban militants in the west of the country this spring, something that the United States had long pressed Pakistan to do.

The military was also helped by an American airstrike in August that killed Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban and the main perpetrator of attacks inside Pakistan.

“Last year at this time I saw a very demoralized governor, and a provincial government ready to relocate,” out of Peshawar, said Maj. Gen. Tariq Khan, head of the Frontier Corps, the force that patrols the province. “Suddenly now people have started seeing some hope and some victory written on the wall.”

Western officials believe that Mr. Mehsud and his Taliban movement was responsible for about 80 percent of the attacks inside Pakistan. A Western diplomat said in an interview this month that Mr. Mehsud’s allies have since turned on one another in a struggle for power, further weakening the movement.

The Taliban said it had chosen Mr. Mehsud’s close ally, a young man named Hakimullah Mehsud, as his successor, but the diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of protocol, said that Mr. Mehsud was killed in a succession battle, and that the man the Taliban has put forward is an imposter. “They sure turned on each other with a vengeance,” the diplomat said. “We are sort of surprised how it seems to have disintegrated.”

Pakistani intelligence officials have also maintained that Hakimullah Mehsud is dead.

Peshawar is the capital of North-West Frontier Province, where the insurgency is strongest, and it has continued to suffer violent attacks even as the biggest cities in the rest of the country have fallen quiet. At least 15 police officers were killed in a strike on a training center in the Swat Valley earlier this month, and last week at least 35 people were killed in a Shiite village in the Kohat area in the northwest.

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